Public Enemies, Local Heroes: The Irish-American Gangster Film in Classic Hollywood Cinema

Abstract

In 1928, Irish-American politician Al Smith went down to defeat in a pres idential election that one historian has described as the first truly great hate campaign in modern American history.1 Smith's nomination suggested that urban Irish Catholic America had finally come of age, but his campaign against Herbert Hoover gave new life to an ethno-religious bigotry likes of which had not been seen since heyday of Know-Nothings in 1850s. Yet Americans who rejected Irish in politics nonetheless embraced them in culture. The twenty years following Smith's electoral defeat saw Irish Americans achieve a privileged place in most dominant medium of modern American popular culture, Hollywood cinema. In 1945, Going My Way, sl film about an Irish-Catholic priest's efforts to save a poor urban parish from insolvency, swept nearly every major award at year's Academy Awards ceremony. The broad appeal of Irish-American stories in Hollywood films of 1930s and 1940s lay primarily in their ability to present Irish as representative of a broader ethnic vision of city as an urban village, fully ethnic yet fully American. The cultural rehabilitation of Irish America began in most unlikely of all film genres: gangster film. For many Americans in 1928, there was little difference between Al Smith and Al Capone. One was an Irish politician, other an Italian gangster; but as urban, ethnic wets, both appeared equally criminal in their threat to reli gious and cultural preeminence of rural and small town Protestant America. Despite ascent of Capone as king of real-world gangsters, Irish American actor James Cagney established Irish-American gangster as most heroic urban criminal of Hollywood's golden age. Little Caesar (1930) and Scarface (1932), gangster films most directly inspired by Capone's life, present gangster as a tragic hero driven to destruction by his desire for greatness; The Public Enemy (1931) and Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), Cagney's greatest Irish